The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.
There's a strong sense in which Greenwald is correct here. But all he does is go out in claim that the right-wing narrative is false.
These election-determinant themes are not merely petty and completely removed from what actually matters. That would be bad enough. Far worse is that they are
complete fabrications. Virtually the entire leadership of the right-wing GOP is the complete opposite of these cartoon icons they are held out to be. Their lives are almost completely devoid of the virtues in which they are packaged. After all, their leaders are Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and the whole slew of tough guy pundits from Fox News and National Review, cheering on wars while imputing to themselves the courage and virtue of those they endlessly send off to fight and prancing around as moral guardians and defenders of individual freedom while, in reality, living lives that rapidly destroy those very values.
But proving that the right-wing is lying doesn't get the job done in the sense that Greenwald and other liberal bloggers have not gotten through the media clutter to make their case before the non-liberal public.
Of course, there are several sources for the failure of liberal blogging in this instance. Liberal bloggers are not as popular or entertaining as right-wing figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Likewise, mainstream media outlets like NPR, CNN, and MSNBC view figures like Greenwald as deadly competition for their secular, culturally liberal audiences and do their best to keep them off the air. Greenwald has a better chance of getting featured on Fox than PBS.
However, it's also true that Greenwald and the other liberal bloggers don't produce enough "truth" about masculinity and the right to outweigh the "entertainment" value of the right-wing narrative.
The right-wing not only does not embody it's own masculine values, but the right has its own patterns of masculinity that is so pathetic that it almost defies characterization. Liberal bloggers have been scratching the surface of right-wing macho. We have to get to its beating heart.
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1 comment:
an observation: many (if not all) of the instances you cite of "weenie men" on the Right, there is some lingering unease about the Vietnam War. Most of them avoided it one way or another. After 9/11, they were caught with their pants down, so to speak; whatever masculine privilege they felt had to supplemented with the codpiece of hyper-masculine posturing, to make up for their lack of experience in war.
Of course, the restructuring of masculine identity has been underway for some time now. I could notice a subtle shift in the mid-1990s, as the metrosexual was emerging as a choice, as well as "the dude" or "regular guy" motif in advertising and pop culture. Nowadays, I see my thoroughly middle class suburbanite male neighbors driving pickup trucks, growing beards, wearing Carhartt clothes, and using chainsaws in their backyards, all as if they have something to prove.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that 9/11 left most people uneasy, and the social role choices left open for some men seemed to have narrowed somewhat. Of course, that all depends on your attitude toward the Iraq war.
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